Setting Marketing Objectives

Before you begin the process of developing your marketing strategy and plan, you need to set out your marketing objectives.

Often businesses simply state the need to increase sales as their sole aim in carrying out any marketing activity. This is a fine as a goal but it is much more helpful to think out more specific objectives, allowing you to address particular issues and opportunities. If your Marketing Objectives and Strategies are good, they will lead to sales.

On a very basic level, Marketing Objectives cover two areas:

1. Current customers
2. New customers

Examples of possible objectives for each include:

Current Customers

Increase spend per customer
Purchase frequency
Customer retention

New Customers

Improve brand awareness
Recruit new customers

Each of these objectives requires its own supporting strategy – showing how it will be achieved. I’ll save those for another post.

Your marketing objectives should be based on a concise analysis of your business’s and brand’s current situation, the competitive environment and your overall business goals.

Remember to base objectives in reality, they have a much better chance of being achieved and ensure that there is a way to measure them at key points throughout the duration of your marketing plan.

1 Comment

Imaginative marketing throws arrows at targets, not toppings on pizzas. Every new owner of a bar believes his/her customer(s) will be everybody. This is a big mistake. Defining the customer is the key to success in small business. Retaining the customer is a hazardous business in a changed economic climage.